Karen Duffin
Karen Duffin (she/her) is a co-host and reporter for Planet Money, NPR's award-winning podcast that finds creative, entertaining ways to make sense of the big, complicated forces that move our economy. She joined the team in March 2018.
Before that, she was a producer at This American Life. She also worked for several years as an independent producer, reporting stories for shows like Radiolab, More Perfect, Reply All, The Moth, Pop-Up Magazine, On the Media, and others. Karen has also been a Moth story coach and mainstage storyteller, and has taught radio at the Columbia, NYU, and CUNY Graduate Schools of Journalism.
Her stories blend in-depth reporting with narrative storytelling about everything from the death penalty to the world's largest treehouse, America's first major interrogation program, the Patriot Act, and San Francisco's "Spider-Man" burglar.
Before becoming a journalist, Karen spent several years as a speechwriter, working in more than 20 countries.
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Many websites make a business of posting mugshots, then charging those people to take them down, but it's hard to stop. The reasons have to do with how First Amendment freedoms are protected.
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The Federal Reserve spends a lot of effort trying to target the level of inflation to about 2 percent. Why? Because tiny New Zealand did it first.
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We go deep inside the market for mugshots. Is it extortion? Or is it a First Amendment right?
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Women pay more than men for many consumer products. Today on the show: Why some economists still think that's a good thing.
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President Trump promised to slash regulations. How has he done?
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We tell the story of a massive crackdown on asylum fraud, and the fallout.
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What a hole-in-one gone awry says about the state of charity.
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That time we accidentally created a cheese surplus so large it had to be stored in a ginormous cave.
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Two economics reporters drive the length of an event known as The World's Longest Yard Sale — stretching from Alabama to Michigan — in search of economic wisdom. They discover a truth of behavioral economics and a couple French records, too.
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Today on the show: Could New Jersey become the next Napa?